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he lived and he said ‘South Kensington’ but that was it. I never had a phone number for him, still less an address. As for what he did, he was ‘a property developer’ – a term that I suspect meant as little to my parents as it did to me. I knew it was somehow connected with these visits he had to make, the great bunches of keys he carried, the piles of surveyors' reports and auction catalogues in the back of his car, and the occasional evenings when he had to ‘meet Perec’, which meant cruising around Bayswater looking for Perec Rachman's Roller parked outside one of his clubs. Rachman would later give his name to Rachmanism, when the press exposed him as the worst of London's exploitative landlords, but at that time he was just one of Simon's many mysterious business colleagues.
    Simon was adept at not answering questions, but actually he rarely needed to, because I never asked them. The extent to which I never asked him questions is astonishing in retrospect – I blame Albert Camus. My normal instinct was to bombard people with questions, to ask about every detail of their lives, even to intrude into their silences with ‘What are you thinking?’ But just around the time I met Simon I became an Existentialist, and one of the rules of Existentialism as practised by me and my disciples at Lady Eleanor Holles School was that you never asked questions. Asking questions showed that you were naïve and bourgeois; not asking questions showed that you were sophisticated and French. I badly wanted to be sophisticated. And, as it happened, this suited Simon fine. My role in the relationship was to be the schoolgirl ice maiden: implacable, ungrateful, unresponsive to everything he said or did. To ask questions would have shown that I was interested in him, even that I cared, and neither of us really wanted that.
    Simon established early on that I was a virgin, and seemed quite happy about it. He asked when I intended to lose my virginity and I said ‘Seventeen’, and he agreed that was the ideal age. He said it was important not to lose my virginity in some inept fumble with a grubby schoolboy, but with a sophisticated older man. I heartily agreed – though, unlike him, I had no particular older man in mind. He certainly didn't seem like a groper. I was used to Hampton Grammar boys who turned into octopuses in the cinema dark, clamping damp tentacles to your breast. Simon never did that. Instead, he kissed me long and gently and said, ‘I love to look into your eyes.’ When he kissed me, he called me Minn and said I was to call him Bubl but I usually forgot. Eventually, one night, he said ‘I'd love to see your breasts’ so I grudgingly unbuttoned my blouse and allowed him to peep inside my bra. But this was still well within the Lady Eleanor Holles dating code – by rights, given the number of hot dinners he'd bought me, he could really have taken my bra right off.
    And then my parents threw me into bed with him. One day, on one of his drop-in visits, Simon said he was going to Wales next weekend to visit some friends and could I go with him? I confidently expected my parents to say no – to go away , overnight, with a man I barely knew? – but instead they said yes, though my father added jocularly, ‘Separate rooms of course.’ ‘Of course,’ said Simon. So off we went for the first of many dirty weekends. I hated Wales, hated the grim hotel, the sour looks when Simon signed us in. We shared a room, of course, and shared a bed, but Simon only kissed me and said, ‘Save it till you're seventeen.’ After that, there were many more weekends – Paris, Amsterdam, Bruges, and often Sark in the Channel Islands, because Simon liked the hotel there, and I liked stocking up on duty-free Je Reviens and my exciting new discovery, Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes. They brought my sophistication on by leaps and bounds.
    As my seventeenth birthday approached, I knew that my debt of dinners and weekends could only